Analyze web traffic data with Google Analytics and R

If you run an e-commerce site, blog or other web property there's a good chance you use Google Analytics to monitor traffic, look at visitor sources, and measure conversions. And while Google Analytics is quite powerful at looking at historic activity on your site, it lacks much in the way of predictive analytics. That's where R shines of course, and it's now quite easy to connect R to your Google Analytics account to make use of R's superior data visualization, forecasting, and other advanced analytics capabilities.

Digital analytics expert Randy Zwitch explains how to use the rga package for R to access your Google Analytics data and import it into R. There, you can use all of R's capabilities to analyze the data. For example, you can use boxplots to look at the proportion of visits to a site via a Google search where the search terms are actually provided:

To interface with Google Analytics you'll need an access token for the Google Analytics API console (the Tatvic Blog provides some tips for obtaining one). Once you're set up, you can run the code at the link below to create your own version of the chart above, or simply start using R to analyze your web traffic data.

randyzwitch.com: (not provided): Using R and the Google Analytics API